Stories by Moss Gropen

This isn’t meant to be an comprehensive, exhaustive, or even representative sampling of the options available to the (relatively) mature San Diegan who seeks a copacetic watering hole. In a city with hundreds (if not ...

“Roger Miller has run roughshod, and there’s no oversight.” No, not that Roger Miller, “King of the Road,” but Roger Miller, grifter of the greens, who calls the shots at Coronado Municipal Golf Course, where ...

Nowadays, while the rattlers remain, steers have been replaced by SUVs, Bambi and his kin are in a witness protection program, and the ranchers have been plowed over by glad-handers who lasso real estate. If ...

Arms wave in the air, hands outstretched as if to grab something fleeting. It’s Friday night at MyCity Youth, fists and music pumping. Teenagers and preteens sway transfixed, all eyes on the stage, where a ...

It’s a mild, breezy afternoon at Agua Hedionda Lagoon. From the vantage of the visitors center, I can see small boats and jet-skis carving whitewater trails off to the west. Right above me are massive ...

“Deport the eucalyptus back to Australia!” That’s Johnny Sevier, a certified arborist, on the tree he loves to hate but that many San Diegans revere, the ubiquitous eucalyptus. Long an arboreal staple in San Diego ...

What exactly is an invasive plant, and why should we give a rotten rhizome if one crops up in our side yard? Dan Gluesenkamp answers: “One widely accepted definition includes two components: It’s not native ...

There’s a showdown downtown scheduled for Friday, August 14, when the case of Murray v. Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest goes to trial in superior court. Carla M. Murray, a nurse practitioner, had worked ...

“It’s not like we’re going to camp out in the parking lot of an establishment.” Lt. Eric Skaja, spokesman for the Escondido Police Department, maintains that the “Avoid the Eight on the 78” campaign isn’t ...

When it comes to the California aggie scene, news headlines scream “drought,” conjuring up, at least in the minds of outsiders, sepia-toned images of impoverished farmers toiling in Dust Bowl grit. But whatever havoc has ...

This would substantially alter the character of Scripps Ranch,” fumes Jenny Marshall, whose 15-member Save Our Scripps (“SOS”) Ranch group is determined to stop a big-box project from crashing the gates of the “Ranch.” In ...

Some Ramona residents don’t like at all the plan to install 42 acres of solar panels on a neighboring property…mostly for aesthetic reasons, despite assurances, promises, and revised plans from the contractor.

"People in apartments aren’t stable; they don’t become part of the community,” grouses G.W., who lives in La Mesa near Mt. Helix. She fears that her tony neighborhood will take a turn for the worse ...

“You play basketball, you play football — it doesn’t work when you say you ‘play wrestling.’” So sayeth Wayne. Who’s Wayne? That would be Wayne Branstetter, the winningest coach in the history of California prep ...

“I’ve never been homeless before.” At least Osiris Murillo still has her car — where she and her three-year-old daughter will sleep tonight, behind the gates of a designated “safe lot” in an unsafe neighborhood. ...

“For my 50th birthday, I bought myself a gutter,” quips Janet Lancaster of Clairemont. She’s talking about a rain gutter, that is — the one that Lancaster and her husband Kelly installed on their roof ...

Police drunk-driving checkpoints are big business. Just ask the City of Escondido, which has been racking up profits courtesy of federal grants and an aggressive vehicle-impound regime instituted by the Escondido Police Department with the ...